As the dust settles on the Icesave referendum, why do I feel like I have a hangover when I don’t?
For a referendum that was ostensibly about nothing, it sure took a lot out of everyone.
And now supposedly 60% of the nation say they don’t want to pay at all.
I want to crawl into bed, pull the duvet over my head, and only wake up when it’s all over.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
I wouldn’t have expected anything else. That figure is showing the hypocrisy surrounding the petition and the referendum. Too many people are preoccupied about Icesave and seem to think that time is working in favour of Iceland – what a delusion!
I think, there won’t be any serious negotiations to settle this dispute in the near future. The opposition can wait now until the government collapses.
But it was nice to see the Blue hand working at peak performance. They must be desperate to get back into power to stymie the investigations.
Time has already worked for Iceland! Better deals are on the table, if I am not mistaken. Isn’t securing better terms positive?
Already Darling is quoted as saying they are ready to be more flexible. Now it’s up to the Left-Green saps to close the deal.
As far as I am aware, Iceland always would have been free to pay up the loan, if they had been able to secure one at more favourable conditions. So, I am not so sure about the proposed deal really being better at all. It is due to the fixation on the Icesave part of the debts that other issues are being neglected and an overall calculation of the costs of those stalling tactics has never been done.
60%? Was that an exit poll from just after the referendum voting? Wow. There’s more truth to that than there would seem to be from just reading the corporate newspeak.
A comment recently from the Financial Times said it all perfectly. I paraphrase from memory:
“We need to fix the international money system so that we don’t have to bail out banks when they fail.”
Let them fail; they might actually learn something from the experience.
The British and Dutch decision to bail out the higher-risk-taking investors was their own unilateral affair, and, whereas common decency might dictate that Iceland ought to be nice enough to help out in this matter, what’s so nice about the British decision to put Iceland on the terrorist list in order to freeze its assets and cripple its future prospects for generations?
Icelanders didn’t tell their banks to go berserk. Those decisions were taken behind closed doors.
So,
1. There’s no reason on earth, apart from sheer niceness, why we should pay.
2. We don’t have any way of creating enough money to pay anyway.
The BIG problem here is that the ruling goberment(understandibly by the way) in the las 4 days or so has campaign in trying to make this referendum as you said “about nothing” when in fact this referndum means and is about more but much more than we would like to accept, for whatever reason it was set forth (I think we all know) it will have incredible repercutions in politic, society and the future of Iceland, and internationally more than people even think, this will radically change politics, and specially Icesave, after this there is no easy way out of it. Forget about a quick deal, this is just propaganda from the goberment, like I said its undertandably, you have to keep on kicking till your last breath, but I do belive that unfortunatelly the current goberment is just throwing it’s last kicks. Then again It is a goberment that was desperately trying to pass one of the must crippling deal in history for any country to take on, and all their efforts during their period were focused on passing that deal, What were they thinking?? that makes me seriously question their loyalties and their capacity to contoll and represent the country. By the way I do belive that for people this vote is more about not paying, people don’t want to pay Icesave, people knew the vote was about the “terms and conditions”, but still what they wanted to say is acctually this: “We don’t want to pay period”. I think that’s more the reallity of this vote, it was and is much more than about nothing.